His DJ Blog blew off: +2.300% visitors in 4 months

Amin Fahmy’s blog djwhitehawk.com is one of the most popular blogs for DJ’s and experienced recently a huge increase of visitors. Amin is talking about his passion and the reasons for his success.

WM: You are running a blog about DJ music, playlists and equipment which attracted last month (august) 272.785 unique visitors. Even more astonishing: in the beginning of the year your site traffic was still rather small – but from march to july 2011 you could increase the number of unique visitors by 2.308,47 %. (Thank you for giving us access to your web stats).

Amin: OK and Hi !

WM: When did you start your website and what was the reason to build a blog for DJ’s?

Amin: As I was working as a residential DJ for a local restaurant, I started this site in around 8/2009 just out of a hobby and curiosity of having my own website. I had tried some free blogging sites, but I didn’t like it as I just didn’t have enough freedom to do what I liked. So I decided to get a domain! Boy I got nervous, it was my first own domain. lol

WM: Which content management do you use and how did you choose it?

Amin: I choose WordPress for it was easy to install from the server, and I believed in it for it’s an open source community, I love open source, but there was flexibility and freedom on how to build with a lot of free stuff too. So that was good place to start, with a lot of documentation so if I get stuck somewhere I would find the solutions easily thru the community. Thanks to the incredible open source community of WordPress.

WM: How many articles do you host on your website, and where is the content coming from?

Amin: Well there is only about 180 posts in there, while I am deleting some old ones one by one that get no search traffic any more. The content is music! lol, since I am a DJ and it’s my job.

WM: How often do you write articles?

Amin: In the beginning I was trying to keep up with 1 post a day, but after a couple of weeks, I just couldn’t. In this niche there wasn’t all that much to write about. So I did the twice a week posts, and that was a bit better, but now I don’t stick to any routine, anything that comes will go around. No special timing. lol

WM: What did you do in march and April this year that increased the number of your visitors? What were the keys to your success?

Amin: I wrote a post about a playlist on house music, which I didn’t like myself but was looking for anything to publish on time. lol. After a couple weeks I saw something interesting going on with this post, it got up to first page Google ranking.
At that time I had 2 posts attracting about 150 visitors a day. I said wow cool. Now this was time I had to do some real thinking as I was reading too much seo crap and info overloading. I said stop! to myself. I looked at myself what I was doing, lol, suddenly AHA moment came.
“Why am I climbing this mountain, it’s so dry and arid, after climbing for 18 months, there is no gold in this mountain! I have to find another mountain where there IS gold, where there is green trees and streams and where everybody is!” lol
So what did this mean? I was doing stuff of what I really liked, but such small traffic, this was the big mistake. You have to find what the people are hungry for and want. Give it to them with your expertise and quality! Now for an example I don’t like R&B music, but with my experience in DJing I gave it to them. This post has at least 1 – 2 k visitors A DAY. The competition is big but so is the gold in the mountain so let’s just go for a small slice. lol
Another tactic that I found was not always new posts all the time but updating the same posts many times like adding stuff to it. The Pagerank helps too. Too many new posts 0 pagerank, same updated post has Pagerank 2 on many of them like the dance and the country posts.

WM: Which kind of hosting would you recommend to our users?

I have moved the website 3 times, aargh! First shared hosting was throttling my traffic when I had 1k visits a day, bad! I had this feeling that I should move (thanks to the the inner light). I moved to another shared hosting which was good, but as the traffic was going up and google ranking too, at 3k visits its not going up any more? Why I thought, one said(mind) well thats it, thats all the traffic you get. lol. BUT this feeling again, lol, MOVE! Researched and researched, I came to a conclusion, what about a VPS? I bought one took me some tiem to figure it out because its a server you have to take care about and you get an fixed IP with no sharing. So I thought yeah good, safer for Adsense. Like Adsense can ban an IP and you are sharing it! So. 5k, 6k, 7k, 8k, 9k 10k lol it stopped rising, well I said I am very happy with that. But what if this server is throttling the traffic at 10 k? With Vps you can upgrade and downgrade anytime for more or less.
So I upgraded one step up to a more power server. Just to finish a long story short, I decided to these top
recommendations if you are on high traffic. Servnt for a “managed” VPS, they take care of your server.
or the Linode for non-managed, you will have to do all the work your self. Linux know how. Don’t go for any VPS if they also have shared hosting. Peace.

WM: What are the biggest challenges that you are facing in the near future?

Amin: Just letting it flow now and so the site will start to get famous, keeping it up. The year 2012 will be good, Insha Allah! I hope I can survive Egypt’s revolution. Lol

WM: Thank you!

*) Amin Fahmy is an egyptian entrepreneur, living in Dahab on the Red Sea. Amin has DJ’ed for years and is a Lounge, Deep House and Club House style of a DJ.